A worldwide bibliography of all types of comic art, including comic books, comic strips, caricature, gag cartoons, animation, editorial cartoons, biography, webcomics, political cartoons, history of cartooning, and comics scholarship.

INTRODUCTION

The Comics Research Bibliography (CRB) began as an online resource in 1996. John Bullough, struck by the success of the Grand Comics Database crowd-sourcing project, proposed a companion project of a compilation of works about comics. Michael Rhode was the only member to join him in compiling an online Comics Research Bibliography. Bullough selected a citation format and created a web interface hosted on his school’s server. Both Bullough and Rhode contributed citations, from their local newspapers and collections, especially from Rhode’s books and magazines. They were unaware of Dr. John Lent’s similar project which he had started for an academic publisher.

Once updates to the online version stopped in 2009 (and the site is now defunct), Rhode decided to irregularly produce print and electronic versions to fill the gap. He and Lent had begun working together on the International Journal of Comic Art, and at the conclusion of Lent’s publishing contract, they began sharing bibliographic data. In 2023, Tony Rose, a long-time Grand Comics Database contributor, joined the team and has processed thousands of citations.

Five print versions have appeared as International Journal of Comic Art Volume 11, Number 3 (626 pages) and print-on-demand Comics Research Bibliography, 2012 (two volumes, 832 pp.), 2018 (two volumes, 1253 pp.), 2022 (two volumes, 1444 pp.), and 2023 (two volumes, 1535 pp.);  and various editions as free e-books: CRB, 1996-2009 (1548 pages, reproducing the original Bullough & Rhode online version), 2012, 2018, 2020 (1324 pp.), 2022, and 2023. An asterisk (*) marks entries or articles that are new since the last published version – 1,701 of them.

This bibliography is always a work in progress – the authors literally have thousands of additional citations waiting to be formatted and included. The number of articles have greatly increased owing to the growing acceptance of comic art as a subject of interest and the simultaneous growth of the internet. Daily listings of articles can be found on Rhode’s ComicsDC blog at https://comicsdc.blogspot.com/search?q=%22Comics+research+bibliography%22&max-results=20&by-date=true.

It is hoped that the CRB is acting as a quality filter by only citing substantive articles or interviews from the web. At one time, typing ‘Fantagraphics’ into Google’s search engine returned almost 3 million results. If you look at the Fantagraphics entry here, you will find far fewer entries, but they will be substantive pieces on the company that will be useful for research.

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